Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data

Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with DataEdward Segel and Jeffrey HeerAbstract Data visualization is regularly promoted for its ability to reveal Stories within data, yet these data Stories differ in importantways from traditional forms of storytelling. Storytellers, especially online journalists, have increasingly been integrating visualizationsinto their narratives, in some cases allowing the visualization to function in place of a written story. In this paper , we systematicallyreview the design space of this emerging class of visualizations. Drawing on case studies from news media to visualization research ,we identify distinct genres of Narrative visualization. We characterize these design differences, together with interactivity and mes-saging, in terms of the balance between the Narrative flow intended by the author (imposed by graphical elements and the interface)and story discovery on the part of the reader (often through interactive exploration).

In this paper, we investigate the design of narrative visualizations and identify techniques for telling stories with data graphics. We take an empirical approach, analyzing visualizations from online journal-ism, blogs, instructional videos, and visualization research. After re-viewing related work, we share five selected case studies which high-

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